CDs/DVDs
Tim Cumming
Recorded more or less live at those venerable studios with a great big sound, Rockfield and Real World, Eliza Carthy’s Big Machine is a monster of an album, big, brassy, and bendy. She has a monster of a group with her too, the 12-piece Wayward band, among them Sam Sweeney, Lucy Farrell, Saul Rose, Beth Porter, and Barnaby Stradling. There are big choruses, big songs and plenty of freewheeling brass, spiky guitars, strings and sharp contrasts in these bold settings of Broadside Ballads from Manchester’s Chetham Library, songs such as “Devil in the Woman”, about domestic violence, the album Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Brit singer Rose Elinor Dougall is best known for her various associations with Mark Ronson and her time in the polka-dotted girl band The Pipettes. Ten years into her solo career she’s well-liked by much indie-centric music media but has yet to carve herself out a recognisable larger profile. Her second album, co-created with London producer Oli Bayston – AKA Boxed In – is sweet-natured, an electro-poppy extension of her 2010 debut, but, unfortunately, lacks real impact.Stellular has the trappings; it’s lushly produced, roves around a variety of 1980s musical tics, and is riven with Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This is a story of an adorable dachshund and her cross-country travels, divided into four parts. So far so cute, but as this is a Todd Solondz movie, it doesn’t stay that way. Kids, avert your eyes. The dog’s first home – and the most impressive part of the film – is with lonely young Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) who’s recovering from cancer. He names her Weiner-Dog and they bond (the first shot of Remi is of him lying on bright green grass in a pose straight out of Boyhood, though similarities end there). But control-freak dad (Tracy Letts) is an owner from hell, even though it was he Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s soundtrack for the National Geographic drama documentary about an imagined manned space mission to Mars in 2033 feels at times as if it were a sketch for the sonic ambience that made Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' much-acclaimed 2016 album Skeleton Tree so intensely atmospheric. Which came first isn’t clear, but suffice it to say, that both inhabit the same dark-hued and super-charged sonic atmosphere.Cave’s music has always been highly cinematic, not least when featuring the imaginative work of his regular cohort Warren Ellis. Here, as in Skeleton Tree, they have Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In the era of star-making TV progs and here-today-gone-tomorrow musicians, just how wonderful is it to have a new album from a man who marked his 80th birthday three years ago by signing a new contract with Eric Corne’s Forty Below Records?John Mayall, Manchester-born “godfather of the British blues”, is a true guitar legend, an elder statesman to whom so many of rock’s key players owe a huge debt – among them John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, Mick Taylor and, of course, Eric Clapton. Whose collection does not include the 1966 classic John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton on which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
New releases by Mike Oldfield don’t exactly grow on trees, but nor can they be deemed rarities. For the first three decades he brought out roughly half a dozen a decade. But Return to Ommadawn is only his second since 2008. As the title announces, it tours the landscape of his third album Ommadawn, which he recorded in his own studio at Hergest Ridge in 1975 and played pretty much everything that didn’t require breath (wind instruments and vocals).It’s roughly the same story here except that Oldfield blows on his own penny whistles, which feature prominently in the mock-Celtic musical Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Charles Burnett is one of the neglected pioneers of African-American film-making. He first won attention back in 1978 with his poetic, powerful debut film, Killer of Sheep. Acclaimed by critics and respected by his fellow directors, Burnett has always struggled to get his scripts on screen, focusing as they do on the reality of black American lives.The Glass Shield, made in 1994, was his best-funded movie and doubtless the film’s producers thought their investment would pay off if they highlighted rapper Ice Cube’s name (he’s a minor character) and sold it as a racy cop drama off the back of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
It may be five years since their last album, Celebration Rock, and the world may have turned several somersaults of late, but Japandroids’ love of tasty power pop songs that suggest Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ bar-room rock with a hefty dose of New Wave attitude remains a musical constant in these crazy times. That said, it would seem that in 2017, Brian King and David Prowse have got their sights firmly set on writing an anthem for the millennial generation, as Near to the Wild Heart of Life is awash with songs of wide-eyed exuberance, flavoured with big production values that Read more ...
joe.muggs
This seems a logical progression for The xx. The super-stripped-back sound of their first two albums has got them a very long way indeed – along with fellow melancholicist James Blake the diffident trio formed a twin-pronged stealth British invasion of American pop culture, influencing the influencers and weaving themselves into the fabric of things. But as they've played ever bigger arenas the temptation to give their sound a bit of a boost must've grown steadily, doubly so given that in the interim since 2012's Coexist their beat-programmer and producer Jamie xx has had sizable success in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Let’s explain the peculiar title first: Operation Anthropoid was the code name given by the Czech Resistance for the planned assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague during World War Two. The events have been portrayed on film before, a notable early example being Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (screenplay and score provided by "Bert" Brecht and Hanns Eisler). Lang took many liberties with the facts, whereas Sean Ellis’s 2016 film attempts to be scrupulously accurate. Heidrich was a repugnant, cold-blooded brute, sent to govern an occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941, his predecessor having Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The flaming pigtails say it all. More St Trinian’s than gangsta, the 23-year-old Croydon rapper Nadia Rose presents (mostly) the lighter side of South London street life. Despite a less than incendiary last place in the BBC’s recent Sound of 2017 competition, Rose had already captured enough attention for Highly Flammable to catch fire with “Boom” and “Station”, 2015’s two feisty singles. They were both a bit rough round the edges but throbbing with the sort of attitude that captures an audience.That attitude is summed up by the video of “Station”, which was shot with Rose rapping on the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
God knows we need originality in pop, and French singer Petite Meller delivers it. At least, she does visually, which, in 2017, is 50 percent of the game. Like Yolandi Visser of Die Antwoord, she offers a direct subversion of femininity. However, where Visser is confrontationally satirical, Meller’s image is uncomfortable, creepy even, Picnic at Hanging Rock Victoriana by way of rouged baby doll mannequin weirdness. The music is more straightforward.What stands out immediately is Meller’s cutesy toddler voice. It’s undoubtedly divisive but, as with rising UK act Let’s Eat Grandma, such vocal Read more ...